Top Three Thursdays

Up first in this week’s top Etsy picks is this wonderful bead wine stopper from Andrea Hoglund’s Sweet Dreams Bead Shop. The shop’s name comes from the fact that apparently she gets a lot of the ideas for her unusual beads in her dreams, as well as being inspired by nature. Hoglund kilns the beads for durability; the stopper is about 6 1/2″ long in total. Why have a drab rubber or cork stopper when you can have something as lovely as this decorating your bottle of plonk — assuming you ever have a half-finished bottle hanging around 🙂 Cost is $36 plus shipping.

Maybe it’s the lighting in the photograph but I fell in love with this stool in Humanhands shop on Etsy. The seat here is made from sculpted cherry, the legs from ash and the footrest is walnut. The creator describes it as “influenced by Shaker furniture, Windsor chairs and mid-century Modern styling.” The stool is 22.5″ high, 15″ wide and 12″ deep and can be customized. The Nashville builder only uses responsibly-harvested domestic lumber and traditional joinery, and leaves a tracing of his hand on the bottom of each piece — hence the shop name I guess. $650. Pricey sure but absolutely lovely.

And finally this from Nestahome. You know how you see something someone has done and think to yourself, Hey I could do that! — but then you never do? Well Nestathome’s shop is a little like that. I was originally drawn to Tandie Nesta’s shop because of her variation of those rustic Amish stars you see hanging on the side of just about everybody’s house these days. Hers are a little different — they’re open and can hang. But once at the shop, I remembered this cool Atlas art I’d seen once before. What she does is take early 20th century Atlas pages and then creates ink blots that she then places on the page. Her Assemblage series, for instance, features pages of different states with “people” randomly placed on the page, like this

or this one with airplanes….

You can pick the state, assuming it’s available. Each piece is about 11″ X 14″ and ranges from $100-$150, depending on the state and art. I just love the antique feel and also their underlying messages, depending on the ink blot. You could send one to a friend as a reminder of where you’ve been or where you’re going, and the map fan would love it no matter what.